The Way Forward

I have many conversations where I attempt to plan ways forward with people. I tend to be an idealist, and I tend to want to experiment with ways I can make a better world. Something that often bugs me is how quick people are to shut down your ways forward.

In many conversations, I will try and talk about an experimental plan of action for the day, or a theoretical answer to a solution. I am talking outside of expertise, and I am talking in a hopeful way, but there are many people who act unusually quickly in hosing down the idea. Those same people seem to rarely state their ideas or their solutions, and think they are an admission of shame whensoever they do.

People are quick to kill ideas, even before hearing them. Playing with ideas, with the building blocks of a solution, can reveal a better path forward. I do not expect anyone to play the game I bring up, but I do leave to be played. Some people I’ve had conversations of idealism with seemed almost threatened by the idea we could be playing solutions.

At times, there is a fear of playing with ideas. It’s something horribly shameful I see in the world. Ideas are most often times the building blocks, the fundamentals, of solutions and answers to the world’s problems. I hope more people can begin to play with them.